This is exactly why I now stay logged out of Quora and use Spectacles (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kbckpcgmpkkfdjhmhi...) if I need to browse over to Quora.
This is a bit f'd, Quora
71–80 of 240 posts
Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora
#72Wow, this is a really big lapse of judgement on Quora's part. I'm contemplating if I should delete my account altogether. In any case, thank you for posting it here - at least people can take the precautions. Edit: That yes/no button is not at all obvious! They need some form of green/red color coding.
You'll have to send an email to privacy@quora.com to delete your account. I did, and they deleted my account. I also told them politely that broadcasting what every user reads to the entire world is very creepy. It is a shame, as the quality of answers at quora is much higher than in other places.
I emailed them a long time ago and they still haven't deleted my account.
Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora
#73The new "social" web is really creepy . Browsing in an incognito browser and logged into nothing has sortof become my default. I don't want google chrome saving my search history, or to accidentally read an article on some news website that then broadcasts that fact to all of my facebook friends.
I think actions like this give everyone a bad name. I'm not sure if it's the "social web" being creepy - it's Quora being really creepy, and destroying their own goodwill.
I think this is a very bad move from Quora. My guess is that they have goals on user growth and had to resort to this tactics in order to achieve that.
If you want to grow your user base, provide more value to registered users. Here are a couple of bullet points you can start with:
1. Grow the community with real content. Do that by first focusing on a specific domain/topic that has a natural draw of users. Stack Exchange draws the programmers crowd and nailed that community. Once you got to a critical mass, other communities will follow. E.g., when you have enough programmers in the same place, some of them will share some common interests like photographs, salsa dancing, etc ... Looks like Quora's base supporters are Bay Area's start up community. This is probably too small a support base for sustainable growth. Either Quora needs to expand this support base quickly or it's the END ...
2. Better relevance/recommendations. I am reasonably active on Quora. I follow 82 topics and got 8 answers. However I don't see any good question in the main page even though I scrolled at 10 page lengths.
Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora
#74I get the impression that Quora is in a tough spot because of the perceived implosion of the "social bubble" after the FB IPO. They have $61M in funding [1], which means that their investors must be demanding bold moves. I don't personally know anyone who works there, so it's pure speculation. [1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/quora
I think Quora would have been great as a “lifestyle business” [insert appropriate sneering as necessary.] Put ads on it for logged-out users, have good SEO and high-quality Q & A, and it'll make a living for a small number of people to keep the site up. This is how Ask Metafilter[1] works, and it is among the best Q & A sites. Metafilter (which includes metafilter.com proper) seems to provide a comfortable living for about 4-ish people (I'm guessing a bit here, I think you could find more info if you looked.)
The problem comes when the company gets funding, and suddenly it's not good enough to become a high-quality, community-driven Q & A site. Suddenly you need to generate some kind of huge exit for your VC owners, and then their recent action start to make sense.
Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora
#75You can disable that in your settings.
Yes, but the default is on. I didn't know that until I saw this post 5 minutes ago. Now I'm thinking of deactivating my Quora account.
Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora
#76FYI, you cannot delete your Quora account from there website. For that, you need to email: privacy@quora.com
I don't believe that's true. I see a "Deactivate" button in my settings. Or is that not the same thing as "deleting"?
Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora
#77[deleted]
Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's insane, that's a bannable offense in Google. How do they still show up in search results?
It's a pretty recent change, give it time.
Yeah Google better kick them to the curb on this one. Man, for all the quibbling over Google latest activity being evil or not, they still do a much better job with basic ethics than Facebook and their ilk. The non-stop attempt to actively change privacy norms by constantly defaulting existing users into more and more revealing new preferences is starting to get really irritating. Facebook I sort of have to put up with because of friends and family, but Quora I'm done with until they reverse this braindead decision. Seriously I don't know who they think they are.
Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora
#79[deleted]
Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora
#80Smells desperate to me. Quora launched with all kinds of "Former Facebooker!" hype that it hasn't really lived up to. I've had some good reads on the site, but only from the cream of the crop threads that make it into the digest emails. Searching out a general question on Quora seems more likely to lead directly to hordes of marketers linking back to their own sites.
I just can't tolerate a site where people upvote you based on where you work and not based on the content of your answer. A recent thread on using "bullets" to separate text elements on a single line wherein a Facebook employee responded by saying "I stole it from Flickr" had more upvotes by far when it was put in the newsletter than a post below it highlighting (with images and historical references) that we've been…
That's exactly the kind of thing I feared upon hearing of Quora's focus on real names back when they launched.
I expect the bubbling up of such things (stuff that is somehow "interesting", but not useful) is a problem for the majority of social sites.
I tend to think the like button / upvote concept is just busted and largely to blame, but I certainly don't know how to solve or supplant it.